TACOMA – The Port Gamble S’Klallam, Suquamish and the Jamestown S’Klallam tribes have filed a lawsuit against several pharmaceutical companies and drug distributors, claiming the companies have flooded their reservations with deadly opioids.

Filed in U.S. District Court in Tacoma on Monday, it names several companies and their subsidiaries – including Purdue Pharma, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson and others – for misleading health care providers and consumers about the dangers of opioids. It also names distributors such as Cardinal Health, McKesson Corporation and others for failing to account for and control opioids in tribal areas.

"The suit contends that the companies manufacturing, marketing, and distributing opioids carried out a scheme to make doctors and patients believe that prescription opioids were safe, non-addictive, and could be used without long-term effects," said Ed Clay Goodman, an attorney with a Portland, Oregon-based law firm representing the tribes in the lawsuit, in a news release. "That effort, as well as the failure of the companies to track orders and distribution of the drugs as required by law, shows companies created an illicit market for highly addictive drugs that have ravaged tribal communities."

Among a host of other allegations, the suit says the pharmaceutical companies made claims downplaying the seriousness of opioid addiction, used deceptive ads, direct-to-physician marketing, speaker programs and webinars, and used physicians to convince both doctors and patients that opioids were safe for the treatment of chronic pain.

It also claims distributors made no effort to visit pharmacies servicing areas around the tribes to do due diligence inspections to ensure that the drugs it was shipping were not being diverted to illegal uses. The suit also claims that distributors had compensation structures set up in a way that improperly incentivized employees to sell more opioids.

The tribes are launching the suit with the intent of joining a consolidation of hundreds of similar lawsuits filed against the pharmaceutical industry by states, cities, tribes, counties and other municipalities. That effort, taking place in U.S. District Court in Ohio, is moving quickly and has entered settlement discussions, Goodman said.

"The tribes feel it imperative that tribal voices are included in the litigation and any settlement discussions to ensure that any remedies – legal or otherwise – include tribes and address their concerns," Goodman said.

In their lawsuit, the tribes level racketeering, negligence, conspiracy, unjust enrichment, fraud and other charges against the companies, alleging that the companies made billions of dollars off the opioid epidemic. The suit notes that the crisis has hit Native American communities especially hard, pointing to data from the state of Washington showing the overdose rate in those communities to be more than twice as high as that among white Washingtonians.

“The crisis has also ripped the fabric of the PGST community,” the lawsuit states. “The loss (through death or addiction) of parents, children, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins to this crisis has been devastating, and will impact PGST for generations. The breadth of the response by the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe illustrates the threat of the opioid crisis to the tribes, as well as the effort and expenditures required to begin addressing opioid problems that stem from defendants’ actions.”

Purdue, one of the case’s defendants, said in a statement that it “vigorously” denied the case’s allegations.

“We are deeply troubled by the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis, and we are dedicated to being part of the solution,” a company spokesman wrote. “As a company grounded in science, we must balance patient access to FDA-approved medicines, while working collaboratively to solve this public health challenge.”